‘She’s so incredibly brave. Her resilience is amazing’ … Thomas Trezise and his wife, Susan Brison, at home in Vermont, September 2026. Photograph: John Tully/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘She’s so incredibly brave. Her resilience is amazing’ … Thomas Trezise and his wife, Susan Brison, at home in Vermont, September 2026. Photograph: John Tully/The Guardian The big interview Rape and sexual assault Interview ‘We were not going to let this rapist destroy our lives’: how one couple came to terms with a devastating attack Anna Moore After Susan Brison was raped and left for dead, her husband, Thomas, did his best to support her. They are still together, while many relationships collapse after a sexual assault. What did he get right – and wrong? And why did she want him to write about her ordeal?
Prefer the Guardian on Google O n a hot, still, silent noon, at a junction of dirt roads in rural France , Thomas Trezise stood scanning the horizon, looking and listening for his wife. He tried to soothe a deep foreboding. Susan Brison had headed out for a morning walk two hours ago. How could she be gone so long?
This was 4 July 1990, the start of what was meant to be a busy summer. Trezise and Brison were both assistant professors in the US – he in French at Princeton and Brison in philosophy at Dartmouth – and had just arrived at the remote farmhouse of Trezise’s French colleague. Life seemed packed with promise. “I’d found someone with whom I really wanted to spend my life and I just felt very, very lucky,” says Trezise. “Susan and I had fallen quickly and deeply in love – it was magical – and at that point, we were also trying to conceive a child. We loved being in France. I kind of felt I’d found my way. It was a good place … until it happened.”
By 1pm, Trezise was still trying to push back a rising panic when, from the corner of his eye, he saw his colleague running towards him, yelling. “That’s the moment I remember,” says Trezise. “I just thought: ‘OK. I wasn’t wrong about something happening.’ It was terrifying.”
An ambulance was at the gate, but Trezise could not recognise the figure inside. She was bandaged, bruised and bloodied, her cheeks hugely swollen, her eyes slits, an enormous bulge on her forehead. Seeing his reaction, Brison slowly lifted her oxygen mask and said in a hoarse voice: “I’ll be OK.”
I knew I needed to be there, I needed to listen, but – this is a masculine thing – I wanted to fix it and I knew I couldn’t Outside on the driveway, Trezise allowed himself one scream to the skies, fists clenched. Though it would be days before he would learn exactly what had happened, it was instantly clear to him that a man had done this to her. Back in the ambulance, en route to hospital in Grenoble, it took Trezise every ounce of will to contain his anger, fear and frenzied emotion, and to instead project calm. It was, he remembers, like “an actor taking the stage”. He became, or tried to become, “the strong, supportive spouse”.
This is the starting point of Trezise’s memoir, Beginning Again, which gives a powerful account of the days, weeks and years ahead. It’s a voice we rarely hear, especially in such depth – a man’s experience of his wife’s rape and attempted murder.
Trezise and Brison are in their seventies now, tenured professors, with an adult son. Within months of the assault, Brison had begun speaking publicly about sexual violence. Before long writing about it too. In 1993, her account was published in th…